Emma Cocker is a writer-artist based in Sheffield and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. Operating under the title Not Yet There, Cocker's research enquiry focuses on the process of artistic endeavour, alongside models of (art) practice and subjectivity that resist the pressure of a single, stable position by remaining wilfully unresolved. Her mode of working unfolds restlessly along the threshold between writing/art, including experimental, performative and collaborative approaches to producing texts parallel to and as art practice. Cocker's recent writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; Reading/Feeling (Affect), 2013; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, and as a solo collection entitled The Yes of the No, 2016.

Given that 2011 was the year of protesting
and dreaming dangerously, 2013 prompts us to think responsively and come up
with useful ideas and suggestions. At a time when the financial crisis in
Greece and elsewhere is reaching a highpoint, the 4th Athens Biennale (AB4)
cannot but respond to this bleak situation through a pertinent question: Now
what? This year the Biennale will set out to explore creative alternatives
to a state of bankruptcy.Using the empty building of the former Athens
Stock Exchange as its main venue, AB4 proposes AGORA not only as a place
of exchange and interaction, but also as an ideal setting for critique.
Contrary to an idealized image of the ancient agora, this new AGORA
points to a radical re-orientation in thinking—one that entails judgment,
ruptures and conflict. As a contested space where multiple theses and doctrines
emerge, this AGORA cannot be taken for granted: it aims for pleasure and
purpose; it opts for the carnivalesque and the ambiguous, for the significant
as much as the insignificant. AGORA draws on the notions of the assembly
and the assemblage. Conceived both as a living organism and an exquisite
corpse, it is formulated through a succession of objects, collaborative events,
performances, roundtable discussions, film screenings, workshops and
educational programs. In AGORA works and theses evoke that which is
urgently needed at this particular moment: an engaged subjectivity, an
unearthing of timely attitudes, a reevaluation of artistic strategies, a
deconstruction of mystifying narratives.

My Brain Is
in My Inkstand: Drawing as Thinking and Process

November
16, 2013 – March 30, 2014

Cranbrook
Art Museum

curated
by independent curator Nina Samuel

Drawing on Drawing a Hypothesis is also included as part of the exhibition My Brain
Is in My Inkstand: Drawing as Thinking and Process, an exhibition debuting at
Cranbrook Art Museum that brings together 22 artists from around the world to
redefine the notion of drawing as a thinking process in the arts and sciences
alike. Sketches on paper are the first materialized traces of an idea, but they
are also an instrument that makes a meandering thought concrete.

Inspired by
the accompanying exhibition The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot, the
exhibition uses multiple sources to show how drawings reveal the
interdependency of mark making and thinking, how tracing lines is a prerequisite for all mental
activity.

The publication On Not Knowing: How Artists Think (eds.) Rebecca Fortnum and Elizabeth Fisher (Black Dog Publishing, 2013) to which I have contributed a text 'Tactics for Not Knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected' and two artist's pages (in collaboration with Clare Thornton and Rachel Lois Clapham respectively) is now available here.

How far does our openness to aesthetic experience, and new forms of knowledge, depend on our capacity to enter and indulge states of wonder and awe, doubt and failure, ignorance and play? How critical are these conditions to the creative process? How do artists invite the unknown into their creative practice? On Not Knowing brings together contemporary artists and thinkers from a range of disciplines to explore the role of ‘not knowing’ within the creative process. The state of ‘not knowing’ or engaging with the unknown is an important aspect of all research. For artists it is crucial, as the making process often balances a strong sense of direction with a more playful or meditative state of exploration and experimentation.

I will be giving the closing key note presentation at a one-day symposium, In Imagination: the future reflected in art and argument, in conjunction with the UK premiere of Forced Entertainment’s Tomorrow’s Parties, at the University of Sheffield, 4th October 2013.

Humans are capable of a unique trick: creating realities by first imagining them, by experiencing them in their minds. When Martin Luther King said "I have a dream", he was inviting others to dream it with him. Once a dream becomes shared in that way, current reality gets measured against it and then modified towards it. […] The dream becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward. By this process it starts to come true. The act of imagining something makes it real. Brian Eno, ‘The Big Here and Long Now.’Comprised of keynote papers and two panels, and featuring a variety of speakers from both professional performance and academic worlds, In Imagination: the future reflected in art and argument will address ideas of imaginative spaces, determination and conceptual summoning as well as discussing the use of theatre as a tool to speculate, predict and conceptualise. The event is organised around two panels: (1) Imaging the Future/Perceiving the future: exploring the prophetic possibilities of imagined worlds, their reflection and affect on the present, and the cognitive relation of the mind to making actual; and (2) Performing the future: Can performance evoke/anticipate the future? How might it do so? By what means can theatre speculate, predict, conceptualise or otherwise open up a future space? Opening Keynote by Tim Etchells and Terry O’Connor (Forced Entertainment); Closing Keynote by Emma Cocker (Nottingham Trent University). Confirmed speakers include Steven Connor (University of Cambridge); Matt Adams (Blast Theory); Joe Kelleher (University of Roehampton); Cathy Shrank (University of Sheffield); Johan Seibers (UCLAN); Carmen Szabo (University of Sheffield); Jess Edwards (MMU); Fabienne Collignon (University of Sheffield).Proposed paper: What now,
what next – kairotic imagination and
the unfolding future seized

Taking its
point of departure from Forced Entertainment’s new performance Tomorrow’s Parties, this presentation considers
two different modes of future-oriented imagination operative within creative
practice, shifting attention from the future as it is imagined within art and
argument (as projection or ‘vision’) towards an understanding of an ever-emergent
future that is endlessly seized and inhabited through the live and improvisatory
act of imagining. Turning from the
product (what is imagined) towards
the process of imagining, the intent
is to explore how within artistic practice the creative production of the
future (as different or otherwise) is perhaps less one of planning or proposing
future-possible worlds, but rather emerges through the restless capacity for
conceptualizing an insurgent ‘or’. Contraction of the word ‘other’, ‘or’ does
not simply present an alternative to a given reality (according to the binary
logic of either/or, this or that) but
instead might be considered a site of repeated intervention and invention (or … or … or),
disrupting the illusory continuity of the past>present>future (all is, as
was, as will be) in search of multiple lines of flight. Here, the imagination
is conceived as a kairotic capability,
an improvisatory tendency located at the threshold between the ‘as is’ of the
present and the ‘not yet’ of the future, that fleeting moment of opportunity
wherein things might change or else remain the same.